A cap system for Legend could be a great idea, first squad with +10 per mission will include super soldiers every time
and I mean full first,second and third rows skills + max stats
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Is that suppose to be an argument for not doing changes to the game? Because DLCs are comming and they will bring a lot of bugs as well. Thatâs the part of development process, especially in the GaaS model.
But this is not supposed to be a different game, but changes to difficulty levels that are not linear. Number of enemies, their AP, HP, damage or aggresivness factor are linear in those games: low on recruit, higher with difficulty levels. Changes like limit number of skill uses, free-aim cost (not to start discussion if it is good or bad idea, just example), maybe additional skill nerfs are not. You play the very same game on both modes, but some features are limited/altered/nerfed/disabled on one of them.
Building house without good foundation is wrong. It will collapse one day.
Any new DLC will bring more and more problems to unbalanced game and make it more and more unplayable.
But on easy you pay for bionic AND another equipment.
I wouldnât say that ⌠Iâm not a game dev, but an engineer, in my opinion it should be possible.
The real question here is: do the devs want the game to be tactical? The decisions and statements made so far have not been promising and are aimed at the opposite.
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I didnât say it impossible. I think it cause more harm then profit )
Just because you donât see profit doesnât mean there is no profit.
Yeah, I have to agree. Not only has it made them more effective, now you get them sooner rather than later whether you want to, or not.
As I said many times before, I want the game the devs want to play. Thatâs all I ask. Iâm willing to invest time and energy in people who are doing what they believe in. Having said that, I donât see any letâs plays of the devs doing First Turn Strikes and jumping for joy at the ârewardâ.
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You know what: it doesnât matter if you âMax Everythingâ as long as the system is designed not to let you âre-use everythingâ an infinite amount of times on every turn.
Take the classic 'Zerker/Assault Terminator Build as an example. Heâs only super-OP because heâs allowed to recycle RC ad infinitum, and whenever he trips up, heâs got a couple of buddies ready with Rally to help jump-start him again.
Now assume he gets to Lvl7 in 6 missions. If at that point, heâs only allowed to get the benefits of RC once per turn, and his buddies can only Rally him a couple of times, heâs still a useful tactical option to alpha-strike that dangerous Siren - as the devs envisage - but heâs no longer the stone-cold map-killer that completely breaks the game.
So the key here is to limit the number of times a super-skill can be re-used in a turn and balance the Pandas accordingly. At that point, it hardly matters if he maxes out his skills because he canât exploit them.
Now Iâm not saying that they shouldnât revisit the SP system, because by all accounts this has gone the usual way of swinging it too far in the direction suggested by player feedback. I was one of those most loudly calling for TCs to be toned down so that you didnât get the ludicrous situation of trainees gaining more combat experience than combat vets - but I wasnât asking for combat experience to accelerate SPs through the roof.
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I think more should be done with training centers. There are some skills i would have as a trained only skill meaning to aquire certain skills you need to spend time and sp in the training center. These would be unlocked via research. EG- mounted weapons which spawns so much on your starting lads but is useless until at least you have the NJ tech or luckily pick up a couple in the first few weeks. I realise this would need to be balanced out and maybe this would be too much on top of cross classing but have always thought it would be a nice way to delay the onset of supersoldiery. (IE the time spent in training centers to learn a specific skill) .
Remove most of the abilities. What is left move to âcommanderâ abilities not attached to any soldiers. Make a separate training tree for commander abilities with itâs own research and pre-requisites. Make PP squads larger. Something like 8 people + vehicle or 12 people per squad. That would be a good start for keeping the game in the same meta from start to finish. This would control the growth of abilities with the pacing of the game through the story missions.
If you really want to stick to abilities on soldiers, then there is no way you are going to get a good balance without cooldowns and still allowing multi-classes. The worst part is that abilities make other features, like ballistics, irrelevant. I understand that making abilities less powerful gives them less utility and people might completely stop using them, but the task of implementing a good system where classes can complement each other and support different playstyles is clearly out of reach for current development team. Why not lower the scope, limit the space of the game and polish that first. A smaller game with better polished gameplay is going to be more enjoyable and successful than many different features tied together in order to please all kinds of demographics not pleasing anyone at the end.
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Why remove? They can be just changed to be less significant. Ok I see the end of your post⌠But I think that it is withing the reach of development team. They need to put some restrictions on their imagination about super-heroes.
That would lead to unification of soldiers. I donât want copies. Probably many players wouldnât want it.
That is nice. 
And this is better solution than removal of skills.
If multiclass would require choosing between skills of both classes then it would be fine.
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The idea with removal of abilities from soldiers is to downplay the importance of individuals. This leads to easier handling of losses, which leads to a much larger gap between loosing and winning. It means that you can have a large threshold for balance as losing few guys in mission wonât matter much. If you move abilities and WP pool into commander, then you can apply the same abilities to soldiers which are left, meaning your âpower levelâ in fight stays longer.
I donât know how much it is in reach as not only release version didnât had a clear design direction, not much changed in this department to his day.
They will still have their skill bonuses and custom faces under helmets, if you are into that kind of thing. Hardly see how you can call them âuniqueâ right now.
Tutorial ends with few guys driving off in a Scarab. Where is that Scarab? 
More seriously, the larger team works as a larger buffer for balancing. You have more people to do things, there are more people who can complement each other. More people with different mobility, means that you can setup your assaults to âholdâ the line and pull support forces (snipers, mg, rockets) to help with attacking. You can have some rookies whoâs job is to carry ammunition or just overwatch against face huggers and etc.
The problem with it is that its not much different to FirXCom, Divinity 2 or even Gears Tactics, which imho done it pretty well. This wonât be a âprogressâ but a regress to doing something that others already did better.
Then it wonât help. The issue is not the amount of abilities per soldier but a geometric combination of said abilities. More classes with excluding abilities would be fine, but a current âfree-formâ multi-classing is a bit of too much. Moreover, how you lock the skills? By level positions? By a count? First one will have a problem of making sure that all possible combinations are âvalidâ. The second feel as simplistic as what we already have in respect to augmentations, like why the hell no more than 2 augs per soldier???
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^This, really. Iâve never really dug the â2-moveâ and âperksâ systems that Firaxcom introduced, and PP semi-copied. Theyâre a novelty, and a nice attempt at reduction of the concept, but as PP seems to be proving, itâs more of a reductio. It seems it just canât be reconciled or balanced properly, at least so far. In attempting to simplify, it garners attention to its underlying âtabletopâ + âcard gameâ stats and rolls, like spells casts in D&D. The ballistics system seems totally at odds with what is essentially a magic system.
I understand and appreciate that anyone can play a game however they wish, and thatâs all cool with me. Personally, I donât really enjoy discussing the arithmetic behind games; I find it a bit wearing, especially when itâs relatively simple, and having to consider the absolute, most logical way to play doesnât really float my boat - although I concede that that is, in logical terms, the optimal way to play - and that my preference is indeed, illogical.
Somehow, the juxtaposition within a game of narrative, setting, âcharactersâ, and story, set against calculation of, and discussion of âoptimalâ anything, with such a strong focus on such relatively few combinations of in-game assets, seems somewhat dissonant. It seems the game becomes reduced to lifting up the curtain and looking at the mechanism behind it, which would be fine, but the numbers arenât terribly complicated - in fact, theyâre quite simple (I hasten to add that I refer to the ostensible mechanics of movement, accuracy, and probability - not of the underlying code!).
I donât like to look at the numbers because it seems too simplistically narrative-breaking. We might as well be playing Sudoku. Should the underlying mechanics even be revealed to the player in numbers, or indicated in some looser, more âanalogueâ way? Iâm not sure. Probably just meâŚ
EDIT: in a way, Iâm saying âShould we even see the squares?â, kind of thing. Bonkers, I know.
EDIT2: By this, I mean for example, in the case of movement, rather than a hard blue area, and a hard yellow area, a zone between the two where there is a case of âconfidenceâ or âcertaintyâ that the character could safely move that far, and still do x, y, or z. This type of concept would bring about a more conservative style of play, with less inherently cynical calculation. Yes, it could represent more of a reliance on chance, but only if the player chose to exceed safe limits. The game could be balanced in such a way that in any situation, such scenarios as âalpha strikesâ could only be achieved on âlucky throwsâ, but still be possible, theoretically. It seems to be the certainty with which soldiers respond to instructions that allows calculation, and flying in the face of the nature of the whole game (and genre), I think thatâs whatâs wrong with it. If you really care to give it the thought, you can throw away the characters, the story, and the setting, and it just becomes a logic puzzle.
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Sort of. What the âmagic systemâ does is subvert the other game systems (including ballistics). Both players can bend the rules in exchange for WPs, which act as both âmanaâ and morale.
And when it works, itâs good: you opt for a âspellâ (or a âgreater exertionâ if you will) for a more certain result, or to achieve something that would not otherwise be possible. However, spending WPs both depletes your capacity to do these exertions and makes your operatives more vulnerable to spells, or exertions from the opponent (e.g. Mind Control, Psychic Scream) and to morale break.
The problem is that you can bend the rules too much at this point. But itâs a balance, not a design issue. The question is not whether it will get addressed - it will - but how and when.
We can come up here with many different solutions, but the devs have to take into account not only that players want different things; they also have to consider all the other changes and features they are implementing to the game.